Camões among african poets

Abstract

The objective of our text is to highlight how Luís de Camões is recognized among African poets. As Mozambican literary critic Francisco Noa points out, there is a lyrical strand in Mozambican poetry that is structured around the Indian Ocean and the island of Mozambique, where Camões, Jorge de Sena and other poets passed through. Among the Mozambican poetic voices that celebrate Camões, we remember Virgílio de Lemos, an expert reader and culturist of Portuguese poetry, who wrote countless sonnets and odes to Camões. Rui Knopfli is another great Mozambican poet, who, in his poem “O Regresso dos Lusíadas” (The Return of the Lusiads), gives a critical rereading of Os Lusíadas. Also embracing an allegorical irreverence and subversion, we find poems by the Mozambican poet Luís Carlos Patraquim, parodying verses by Camões. Through wandering, Patraquim’s poetry, in the corrosive vein inaugurated by Knopfli, imposes itself as a counter journey to unveil some of the gaps in history. We can’t fail to mention the great poet José Craveirinha, the “Camões of Mafalala”, so named by the writer Mia Couto in 1991, not only because he won the Camões Prize and never left the outlying neighborhood of Mafalala, but for the seduction and clandestinity with which he was able to mix the orality of the ronga words of his black mother’s language with the Portuguese language inherited from his Algarvian father, who introduced him to the rhymes of Portuguese poets, including Camões, whom he admired and from whom he was able to capture the method of creating sonnets. Finally, we make a quick reference to the anti-epic poem As Quybyrycas, by Frey Ioannes Garabatus.